Introduction & Overview
Road safety is everyone’s responsibility. Any safety incident on the road has the potential to change someone’s life in an instant. With advances in road safety measures such as advanced traffic control, improved road networks, and relatively safer cars, I wanted to investigate if Victorian roads are getting any safer?
Vicroads, is a government organisation managing road infrastructure in the state of Victoria. Vicroads has provided a very rich open data set in relation to road crashes from 2006 to date under Creative Commons license. Please refer to “@ Data” page for more details on the data used for this analysis.
Data consists of various variables related to an incident, from the type of vehicle , type of accident, people involved, accident severity, environmental factors, and many more. Using all these variables can draw a more accurate conclusions but for the scope of this work, I have focused on the following 3 key basic elements.
To understand and explore any patterns over years and any specific patterns within that time period.
Accidents can be minor or major from simple fender benders to multiple fatalities. Understanding this will help us focus on the root cause for major incidents.
Understanding the type of accident is crucial to explore areas for improvement. e.g. If more pedestrians are killed then we need to focus on pedestrian safety mechanisms.
There is a noticeable reduction in the number of road accidents from 2017 including a 57% reduction in 2020 compared to 2019 due to widespread restrictions. One noticeable difference was reduction in medium severity incidents compared to low and high severity incidents. On a closer look, there is no noticeable difference in the number of fatalities excluding 2020 with the majority involved in a collision with fixed objects or vehicles and surprisingly Pedestrians.
This analysis concludes that there is a positive trend of reduction in medium severity impacts, at the same time more analysis is needed to understand and develop strategies to reduce number of fatalities.
Storytelling with open data
MATH2404: Data Visualisation and Communication
Author: Srihari.Konda
Reference material: Data visualisation: From theory to practice, by Dr James Baglin
Development environment
CrashStats data is provided to users by VicRoads for the purpose of supplying information about road crashes in Victoria for educational purposes.
The data provided allows users to analyse Victorian fatal and injury crash data based on time, location, conditions, crash type, road user type, object hit etc.
File ACCIDENT.zip contains the following files extracted from the VicRoads CrashStats database. See Additional Information for the period of data extract.
The files are as follows:
Tables
accident (basic accident details, time, severity, location)
person (person based details, age, sex etc)
vehicle (vehicle based data, vehicle type, make etc)
accident_event (sequence of events e.g. left road, rollover, caught fire)
road_surface_cond (whether road was wet, dry, icy etc)
atmospheric_cond (rain, winds etc)
sub_dca (detailed codes describing accident)
accident_node (master location table - NB subset of accident table)
Node Table with Lat/Long references
The files contained are documented in the CrashStats User Guide and Appendix, accessible at:
http://data.vicroads.vic.gov.au/metadata/crashstats_user_guide_and_appendices.pdf
Additional Information Field Value